During this portion of our class, I was asked to create an instructional slideshow presentation explaining how to use a peripheral. I will admit that at first I was attracted to the drawing tablet. However, upon taking it home, I found that it was really similar to the Paint program that's already installed on my computer (perhaps I didn't really delve deep enough to find the cool stuff). So when I returned to class on Monday, I decided to try something different. I chose the digital microscope.
Alright, for those of you who chose not to use the digital microscope, you should be sorry. It's freaking awesome. During the summer I work with students at a summer camp and I can already see my boys wanting to examine some cool crawly bugs under this thing. What's even better about the microscope is that it is pretty simple to use. I mean I could figure it out, so it can't be THAT complicated.
For my 'teaching lesson' i decided to create an instructional slideshow explaining how to dissect a flower under the microscope. I began with the assumption that students would already know how to plug their microscopes in, open them under applications, and focus their microscopes. From this assumption, I asked the students to dissect different parts of their flowers and take pictures of them. I also asked the students to create a 'Petal Movie' showing the transformation of a petal that is fresh and alive to dead and decaying. The cool thing about this feature is the fact that students will be able to see the progression in fast motion 'ala Planet Earth' style.
Creating the Power Point was not a horrible challenge to me. I worked a lot with the program in middle school and high school and I felt fairly confident around them.
The only downside to the digital microscope is the fact that you need a MAC to run the microscope program. For a PC user like me, this was a real downer. I was able to accomodate myself to create this lesson, and it was kind of cool to try something new on a type of computer that I'm not used to.
Overall, I thought this lesson was pretty cool. It has given me lots of ideas for what to do in my own classroom, and it's something that I look forward to.
Till the next blog
Sam
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1 comment:
I completely agree that the digital microscope is one of the coolest tools you can have for a classroom. It was one of the tools that was in constant use in my classroom. Students used it to explore, to create time-lapse movies, and to run little experiments largely without my intervention. They're inexpensive enough that just about any classroom can afford one (more are better) and easy to use.
Just to be clear--there is a Windows version of the software that comes with the microscope, but we don't have a copy of it in the lab. I'm working on getting one.
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